(NewsWorthy.news) – A New York Court has ruled that Jewish leaders are free to continue calling Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan antisemitic. The black nationalist group sued the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Anti-Defamation League for $4.8 billion, claiming that the organizations had violated the First Amendment rights of the Nation of Islam by calling Farrakhan’s comments about Jewish people “antisemitic”. On April 5 Judge Denise Cote dismissed the suit, and wrote that Farrakhan had not provided any evidence to conclusively link the writings and actions of the two groups to injuries sustained by either Farrakhan or the Nation of Islam.
The black nationalist has caused controversy over the years by comparing Jews to termites, saying Hitler was a “great man” and claiming a “synagogue of Satan” runs the U.S. government. He also blamed “sexual perversion” and cases of pedophilia in Hollywood on Jewish influence. Cote concluded that the claims of antisemitism related to direct quotations of Farrakhan, and that there was no evidence that the use of the word had damaged the Nation of Islam.
The ADL has a history of criticism itself; Muslim groups wrote a “Muslim & Allied Community” statement in May 2022 attacking the ADL for its history of “aggressively intimidating” Arabs and allegedly marginalizing and slandering people from Muslim communities and Palestinian activist groups. The group was also found to have spied on Muslim communities in a 1993 FBI investigation into the ADL that discovered the organization had thousands of computerized files on Arab Americans and Arab organizations. In 2021 civil rights groups in New Jersey slated the ADL for accusing the executive director of New Jersey’s Council on American-Islamic Relations of anti-semitism over his support for black and Palestinian solidarity against police brutality.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center has also been criticized for attacks on Islam; in 2010 a coalition of Jewish groups gathered outside the organization’s Museum of Tolerance in New York to protest its opposition to an Islamic community center in Manhattan.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper from the Wiesenthal Center praised the country’s judicial system for validating the organization’s First Amendment right to tackle and call out antisemitism. He accused Farrakhan of attempting to silence Jewish voices with his lawsuit, which claimed the two organizations had falsely labeled Farrakhan and the NOI as antisemites. The press release in October 2023 also accused the groups of falsely mislabeling numerous entertainers, educators, athletes and comedians as antisemitic.
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